Thursday, August 31, 2006

1K's next Top Model

This is a story from long ago. A year full of geekiness. In fact, my whole class was filled with bespectacled teenagers, had an aura of awkwardness around them, who enjoyed maths immensely and was well known for it's noisiness. The class was known as 1K, whereby K stood for Kenanga. I have no idea what the name is in English, the dictionary that was lying here on my desk only defines 'kena' as hit and 'kenangan' as memories. Just my luck!

Those were the years when lifelessness ruled. You'd wake up, have a bit of the morning to yourself, and get ready for school at about 11, have a quick lunch, and wait for the school bus around 12 to reach school before 12:50 pm Monday to Friday. School starts a little later on Fridays, but the school bus comes the same time anyway. Then you'd spend the whole afternoon/evening in school right up till 6:30 p.m and by the time you got home around 7:30 pm, you'd have enough time to have a shower, eat some dinner and do homework the rest of the day. Those were the times when the teachers were still dedicated and made sure you did your homework every single day.
That was also the time when the class started experimenting with fashion, not their own, of course for they were forced to wear a white blouse and a turquoise blue pinafore. If anything could be called ugly without an iota of guilty concioussness, it would be that uniform. It was a foolish design... why would anyone have school kids with potentially dirty days ahead wear something light coloured like that - the dust, falling on muddy scholl fields, etc?
However, this group of rather well meaning girls had a teacher, known as Ms N aka The Lioness due to her strict demenour. Despite being given the opportunity to shine in the fashion department - she was stick thin, she made no use whatsoever of the good fortune at her doorstep.
A normal observer would have noticed that her fashion sense needed serious mending. Couldn't she see that all the other teachers wore something nice every once in a while? Didn;t she know that straight black knee length skirts matched with equally straight cut covering the bum blouses were... not what 13 year olds needed to see every day in their already boring lives?
We had SY, a cheerful classmate and friend who shared the same surname as Ms. N. We also had a bunch of plastic bags (for lining the waste paper basket) and a pair of scissors. I do not know if it was mere impulse or a planned fashion revolution, where SY got (rather voluntarily) decked in in a Parkson plastic bag (fashioned as a sleeveless T) and a black garbage bag (cut so that there was a high slit and an uneven length) as a skirt right before maths... Ms. N's subject.
Everybody surrounded SY in her new clothes, and one of the classmates turned commentator and began explaining the details of the design for the benefit of those who were not directly involved, i.e; those who sat like good little kids at the front of the class.
A familiar sound of 'tok tok tok' ensued, The sound of tired footsteps, trudging up the flights of stairs in tired heels towards our class.
Scissors moved to get the ensemble off SY before Ms N saw and suspected that something mischievous was brewing. She entered the classroms amidst stifled giggles, took a piece of chalk and started writing the day's lesson on the blackboard.

Making sport of one's teacher is a global enterprise then. Maybe peace would bust out all over the planet if people shared stupid teacher stories. I had two past lives as a junior high teacher, before I got married, and then after I had a child. When I was single my name was Miss Ringler. The students called me Miss Ringworm. After I got married my name became Mrs. Martin. What could they do with Martin, I asked myself. My students called me Mrs. Martian. Go figure.

silversabre: Come to think of it I miss those silly old days too... not a care in the world (sigh)

evolna: Hi! Thanks for dropping by. Hmmmm... I guess the difference is what makes life more interesting... Whaddya think?

gem:I 'dig' school stories... I must admit though that we made fun of a few teachers... not their names though, but more through their dressing... I had a history teacher who used to wear a neclace made of seashells to class, and coincidently she was teaching us about these 'cowrie' shells that was used as currency during the stone age in this part of the world. How were we supposed to not make fun of her?

Used to hate when teachers gave under-appreciated Prometheus' work, both curricular and extra curricular. Prometheus and the gang had names for teachers too. Now, ages into the future, Prometheus would give an arm and a leg, preferably someone else's, if only he could go back and live the school life again. Prometheus met his teachers once, 10 years after school, and all of them laughed and cried for hours. Next to mommy, teachers are Prometheus' fave persons in this planet full of the nasty homo sapiens.

I don't think i'd go to the extend of giving an arm and / or a leg (even if it is someone else's) to get back to school... but I sure do miss the fun times we had, and some of the teachers, though I sadly heard that my poor chemistry teacher had quit teaching after some severe nose bleeding in her efforts to educate students :(